Looking for a flexible Joomla programmer shouldn’t be such a headache. We have two excellent guys who’ve helped us in the past who’ve done some incredible customizations for our sites.

At up to $70 an hour it’s unproductive asking them to do simple Joomla tasks so we want a few coders who are happy to do the simper work at a fraction of that hourly rate.

We used the usual channels to source some staff yesterday and were disappointed to find that we’ve rejected over 20 applicants so far.

Some might accuse us of being too aggressive in our interviewing but, considering each position we advertise gets over 50 applicants then its worth us trying to eliminate most of them efficiently.

An interview practice we’ve set up is to provide applicants with 9 simple tasks in Joomla that we know how long they should take. We ask applicants to provide a brief description as to how they’d achieve the task and how long they expect it would take.  We ask them to indicate the number of hours the job should take - knowing full well that most jobs take between 5 and 15 minutes.

We don’t tell the applicant that we know perfectly well each task should take because we’ve done them ourselves. Instead we let them assume that we don’t know anything about Joomla at all.

We have wasted hours today suffering from the same cliched messenger conversation which always begins like this:

Interviewee: Hello
Us: Hi
Interviewee: How are you?
Us: Good, who is this?
Interviewee: We are applying for your job
Us: What Job?
Interviewee: The Joomla Job
Us: OK, so have you received our email?
Interviewee: Yes
Us: So please reply to it. Do you have any questions?
Interviewee: No
Us: Ok, please do that then
Interviewee: OK
Us: Bye
Interviewee: Bye

Of the 20 we’ve rejected, 10 of them have needed to be told to follow the instructions in the email we sent to them. They all replied back to us either without providing descriptions or without providing time estimates.

Sadly the kind of time estimates other providers gave us were insulting at best, a complete scam at worst. Work we’ve done ourself in 10 minutes was quoted as a task that would take 2-3 days (8 hours of work for 3 days each!!).

Thankfully we are experienced enough to know how long simple jobs take but I pity the new entrepreneur who pays these people to create a website for them and is billed for 100+ plus hours when their ’supposedly’ cheap programmers knock out the work in a few hours.

For those of you experienced with Joomla here’s some of the estimates we’ve been given.

Task #1 Upload an existing Joomla template and delete any references within it that say "Created by Jooma Template Provider"

Longest Estimate: 4 hours

Task #3 Backup the entire Joomla website and database

Longest Estimate: 5 hours

Task #9 Add a ‘contact us’ form to an article

Longest Estimate: 8-10 hours
 

You might have your own approach for finding good quality workers. If you do please do post below.

For any of you who are not experienced in recruiting freelancers please do realize that the cheap providers often inflate the hours required to do a job by sometimes many THOUSANDS of percent.

Try to have a good idea of what the work really entails before commissioning it otherwise you risk being severely exploited.  And, if you’re not being exploited you’re probably employing an idiot!

Today we completed a sale of 420 .info domains that we registered at the end of 2007.  We sold them at Digital Point within 24 hours of advertising them.

Whilst we made a loss on the sale, we’d written off the domians after we learnt that we would not be able to effectively profit from them in the way we anticipated.

We’d undertaken a 1-month course in portal-building with PGInsider at the end of 2007.  Portal-Building is the creation of junk sites that contain hundreds of pages of rubbish but the creators add adverts at the top of the pages that they can capitalize on or redirect visitors to other sites.   

We were planning on using these domains to build a huge network of websites that generated passive income or increased traffic to our whitehat sites.  Sadly PGInsider omitted to mention that the methods they were training us with are pretty much unworkable and unprofitable nowadays.  The company dramatically closed its doors, removed all records of the support staff ever existing and alienated all it’s members.  It was a remarkable example of how a long-establsihed website could lose all customer loyalty in only a 24 hour period.

We are actively looking to clean up our domain portfolio now, we have about 30 domains that we actually use and a lot of domain names we plan to hold on to.  The rest we are looking to sell for a modest amount just to clear away the clutter.

It’s getting very difficult to find good domain names these days and we’ve strugged recently.  CommunicationInspiration.com - one of our sites in development - is a horrifically long name but, seeing as there’s no synonyms for ‘communication’ we were left with very few options.

We appealed against the closure of our Adsense account on the basis that it was completely unjustified.  Seems like Google’s policy is to imply that you’ve done something bad but "for security reasons" they won’t tell you what it is.

Our appeal was met with Google’s automated response of …

Thanks for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we’ve re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we’re unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

The Google AdSense team

Again we’ve responded but, after much research online it seems that the simplest thing to do is just to look for other revenue earners.  Our monthly income from Adsesne has never been more than $200 and we’ve only ever used it on site’s that we are lazy to update.

As an experiment though we applied and were accepted for a new Adsense account in our business name.  We’ve listed exactly the same websites as with our previous account and got approved within 24 hours.

Whilst it will be impossible to trust Google Adsense again we’re going to replace our now-expired adsense codes with our new codes.  We are curious as to whether Google will acknowledge that our sites are legitimate and adhere to their terms now that we are presenting them with a corporate face instead of a personal one.  Over the next few months we’ll likely phase-out Google Adsense and replace it with advertisements from other providers.

For no discerible reason our Google Adsense accout was suspended today.

The only explanation we could possibly think of was that since registering for a US VPN perhaps Google believes us to be deliberately trying to hide our IP address when registering with them.

Fortunately we are not dependent on Google at all with any of our sites however, whilst the issue remains, a lot of these sites have gaping holes in them where adsense no longer is displayed.

Apparently we should have received notifiction from Google explaining the suspension but we certainly never received anything.

We are 100% certain that we’ve not done anything in breach of Google’s terms because all the sites that use adsense have been left dormant for many months as they’re not our big earners at all.

Now it’s a case of waiting a few days to be contacted by either a Google representative or (more likely) some automated email service to tell us what’s happened.

Our first instinct is to replace all adsense from our sites.  Google Adsense have twice now suspended accounts of ours without providing a reason and both times have been when the sites in question have not been modified in any way.

We were very impressed today with Ebay’s Live support.

Their site has a bug whereby it’s not possible to chance both your country and your business-type together.  We found a work-around to do this and I had the assistant’s undivided attention for about 15 minutes.

It is rare that we ask for the opportunity to complete a customer satisfaction survey but we really wanted to express to Ebay how appreciative we were about their sincere live-support feature. 

These days it is rare for a live suport to actually work.  Most times the support rep chooses between a handful of canned responses which often are not 100% relevant to your enquiry.  Other times the support represenative seems to only know one phrase:  "Please open a support ticket".

In this case, our wait time was less than a minute, our problem was quite technical and unprecedented and we really felt like we were being taken care of.

Kudos to Ebay for the excellent work.

Now that we have converted an estalished ebay personal account to our business account, we shall begin placing some of our Art From Steel statues for auction.